The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Sometime back when Tyee Store was still the economic center of the South End I walked in from my trail connecting our Shangri-la-la with the other side of the island after spotting a car like we had, same vintage, and since we were pushing 275,000 miles on it, I wondered how many miles this one had, hopefully an additional 100,000 which would give me unbridled optimism about ours longevity.   We were the only two customers so I assumed it was his car.  “How many miles on that rig out there?” I asked the guy at the counter purchasing his cigs and beers.  He looked around at me and the look on his face immediately veered from innocent bystander to potential casualty.

He said he didn’t know and stopped looking me in the eyes.  His were glued to the floor.
“You don’t know how many miles your own car has?” I persisted, thinking maybe we could wander out and just have a look-see on the odometer.  Logic is one of my strong points, as you can see.  I think I might have asked it in a somewhat incredulous, possibly even rude tone of voice, one that rattled him.

“It’s not mine, it’s my uncle’s,” he finally offered lamely, trying to get his bill paid and his change back.  His nervousness quotient was palpable now but hellfire, all I wanted to know was whether I could expect my own chariot to run into the next decade or not, what’s the problem, kid?  Patty behind the counter watched this dispassionately.  Tyee gets plenty of weirdness, nothing to make her reach for the panic button or a phone to alert the authorities.  Yet.

“Your uncle’s?”  I asked, starting to wonder if this was a stolen vehicle, none of my business, of course, but then again, a concerned citizen.  That might be my car the punk had hotwired and made his escape to the hideaways of the nettle savannahs of the South End.  Civic duty required maybe I ask one more time, “So you don’t know how many miles on that jalopy of your uncle’s.”  By now Patty had given him his change, bagged his goods and parked the receipt in the bag.  The kid was sweating noticeably, hands shaky, eye contact non-existent.  “I told you I don’t know,” he muttered as he swept by me and out the door.

I looked at Patty and said, “Man, that guy was nervous as a cat.  Whaddaya make of that?”

“Your hat,” she said.  “DEA.”  I had forgotten that I’d tossed a ballcap on before taking to the woods, one that meant Drug Enforcement Agency to the kid, I guess.  Whatever sadistic pleasure I’d taken from our little tete-a-tete gave me some idea what a cop must feel like when a few questions, innocent enough, break the subject’s will.  Cat and mouse.  Sadism could rear its ugly head.  When I got home, I put the cap away.  The cops don’t need my help anyway.  My car died a couple weeks later, ran out of oil, blew up the engine.  I guess that answered my question without the kid’s help.

Every day I get a call, sometimes 3, from some nice stranger who wants to know if I’d be willing to sell them my house.  My house, it seems, is very very popular.  I wish I was that popular but I’m the owner of said house and maybe that should be enough for me.  Course, none of these would-be buyers have ever seen my house, at least not the inside.  I suspect they can find a google shot of the street and the outside, probably know what Zillow thinks it’s worth, surely know what I paid for it or have a guess since I built it myself so the county records wouldn’t have the price I paid if we’d bought it 30 years ago on the open market.

For awhile I’d tell my nice stranger when they asked if I was interested in selling, “You bet!”  This almost always caused a long pause, no doubt my caller wasn’t used to a potential sale and certainly not one whose owner was enthusiastic.

“Well, um… did you have a … um … price in mind?” they would ask.  And I would practically shout, “I do indeed!!”  “And … um… what were you thinking, price-wise, I mean?”

Sometimes I would say two million dollars, sometimes less but a helluva lot more than they hoped some Alzheimer owner might throw out, some grandma with dementia still able to sign over the deed for double what she paid for the place 50 years ago.  Which inevitably resulted in another long pause before they recovered enough to state that we could probably come to some kind of mutual agreement.  To which I would reply that the price just went up, take it or leave it.  When they started to speak again, boom, price just went up another hundred thou.  Followed by a click.

You get tired of fooling around with these people, though, after dozens and dozens, one after the other, sometimes, I suspect, the same yahoo.  If you haven’t got anything better to do, tell them a low ball number and wait for the heart palpitations and the salivating you can hear over the phone.  Got a live one here!

Got a sucker who’s selling for a fifth what the place is worth!

Sure, fun for a few times, then you start calling them names, question their morality, engage in some back and forth curses, and then, well, you do like I do finally when they ask if you’d be interested in selling your house, just say I was hoping someone would want to buy this place, I need to move to the Home and this is practically a godsend.  Then hang up …

Whatever you do, don’t answer the next few times the phone rings.

Twenty-five years ago I agreed to put a stained glass window into the proposed Visitor Center the Chamber of Commerce was planning to build at the strategic Y where traffic north separated traffic south for most everyone coming onto the island.  I guess I figured some small panel in a doorway sidelight maybe, nothing to write home about, just a small donation.  When I sat with the architect, the original design was basically a box with a shed roof and when he asked me what I might consider doing for glass, I drew in a quarter moon over the door.  He shook his head in confusion and I said it looks like an outhouse, why not pop in the iconic quarter moon insignia.

Yeah, I wonder too why I seem to never get along with architects.  He said give me a minute and walked back to his drawing table, then came out a few of those minutes later with a sketch of what would become the Visitor Center, tall box with a curved roof and a giant X metal framework in the entire front, fifteen feet high by twelve wide.  And so I volunteered to do the entire front, a dramatic piece for the highway traffic.  For the first weekends of construction I offered my help, after all, I had built my own house and I was full of piss and vinegar, but after the initial structure was up, the contractor who’d volunteered his time and his crew told us he had to get back to his day job.  And so I became the de facto project manager.

It took me from spring into late fall to complete the Center and its sculpture park.  Lots of politics, fights with the Chamber folks, arguments with my artist buddies, begging for donations, all that fun stuff … but we did it, we built an Art Park and a Visitor Center.  And we ended up with 3 and a half acres behind it for extending the Sculpture Park, what is now Freedom Park.  The Chamber, about five years ago, decided to vacate the building and rent it to a local artist who promptly stuck huge posters of comical animal asses on the front and covered the artwork of our most well-known artist with a caricature of himself.  You bet I was annoyed.

A month or more ago the folks from Freedom Park who now own the property in front asked if I could repair the damage to the original glass mural.  I took a look and told them the panels were almost all shot with pellet guns, thrown bottles and lawnmower rocks, but if they were serious about rehabbing the building and park, I’d give them a new mural, new design, all gratis.  The tenant wasn’t happy about being asked to vacate for a few weeks while all this upgrade took place and he ultimately took his butt banners and his posters and went home .  Adios, amigo.

Fast forward to two days ago.  Grant Shaw, the hombre spearheading all this upgrade, the guy who scraped and primed and painted the metal front, the spark plug for what will be a complete refurbishing of the building and the landscape, Grant hauled in ladders and I hauled in ten panels of new glass.  Took us all day and had to recruit a couple of unsuspecting volunteers from the playground behind to help us hoist the 4×5 foot upper panel to the board we’d run through two ladders where we stood 12 feet up, but we got it done.  You think it didn’t bring back memories from 25 years ago, you’d be dead wrong.  You think I’m not worried that something similar to the past fiasco would happen down the road, yeah, same as the above.  You think I’m not happy to see a new bunch of volunteers helping put this corner back together, maybe better, well, think again.  For awhile I feel about 25 years younger, a little sore from the installation but once again proud of what a few people can accomplish.  And yeah, I know, most folks won’t notice.  But I’m used to that.

My neighbor Jill was working down at Labor and Industries and since I needed to get a contractor license so I could install my stained glass in a state project for two whole days, I ended up with Jill.  The whole process took half an hour so we covered subjects ranging from dogs we have owned to retirement strategies for us geezers.  Jill’s main point was the necessity ‘to keep moving’ when you retire.  She herself wanted to establish her post-retirement interests pre-retirement.

“I used to work at the Casino,” she said, something I didn’t know.  “Lot of people spent their whole day sitting on a stool playing the slots.  You didn’t see em for a few days, you could figure they probably died.  The Casino was their whole life.  We even provided funeral services.  Why not?  Half their friends were us casino workers.  You have the funeral in-house, we didn’t take half a day off to go to a funeral downtown.”

I said it was something I never imagined.  Maybe scatter their ashes under the crap table, one stop shop.  Jill muttered ‘why not?’  and kept stamping my documents, checking stuff against her computer screen read-out, asked an occasional question.  “Lot of those folks,” she said, “they thought of retirement as dying.  Kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy.”

Kind of like filling out this endless paperwork, I thought.  “Uh-oh,” Jill said after half an hour and I thought here’s where you return to jail, do not pass Go.  She asked a few questions, made one small change on the form that warns NO CHANGES PERMITTED.  Casino work, I thought, might not be as far removed from government bureaucrat as I thought.  I bet L&I might even provide funeral services for those of us who died in these long lines … but I was hoping I wouldn’t find out today.

I confess.  I have a TV.  Not a very big TV, not a drive-in theater size TV, just a TV that our friends find maddening if we want to watch a movie together but that seems plenty big enough for the mizzus and me.  I don’t want to build another house to make room for a 60 inch television.  But I do want to watch the news and a few shows.  And I don’t want to pay for cable or satellite.  Not that I wouldn’t want to watch 100 stations with the weirdest content imaginable just to get PBS.

So it probably won’t surprise anyone to know that I have an antenna on the roof.  Since everyone went to digital, the old antenna wouldn’t pick up anything.  Nada, zip, zero.  Thanks a lot, FCC.  The first UHF antenna would catch a few stations, not most, and even then you had to haul up to the roof, turn the antenna, climb back down and see if that picked up the station you were after and when it didn’t repeat the above.  Great exercise, not good viewing.  Like the internet, TV reception out in the boondocks is for the birds.  Sure, the providers promised high speed updates, but any fool knew they were lying.  And now that the pandemic has forced us all into quarantine, the internet with everyone logged on is reminiscent of the old dial-up days with buffering that lasts longer than TV commercials.

A week ago I did some buffered research on TV antennas, ordered one online and got it a few days later.  The old one, which actually wasn’t very old at all, had replaced the previous one that refused, no matter what compass direction I pointed it, to pick up PBS.  PBS, we learned through further internet buffered research, had a slightly weaker signal than any other station this side of Portland or San Francisco.  Close, but no cigar, so I figured get a slightly bigger antenna but maybe not as big as a large array telescope.  With high hopes and plenty of pessimism I hauled the new aluminum job up to the roof peak, attached it to the metal mast, pointed it in the direction of Seattle and Gomorrah, climbed back down the ladder and turned on the TV.  Wow.  The stations were really a lot crisper, all of them.

All of them except PBS.  Which didn’t come in at all.  PBS asks us for contributions all the time.  Maybe when they offer a repeater station instead of a cheesy coffee mug for a donation of 120 bucks a year, they might have a shot.  Until then, they can quit asking.

We used to stand in our garden and look out across the highway with great views of the Olympic Mountains and Puget Sound.  But, of course, inevitably progress reared its ugly head, the acreage on the bluff side got parceled and houses got built.  The new folks refused to honor some of the commitments the developer had agreed to, cut the green belt between us and closed off our promised access to the beach below.  Our ‘view’ rapidly became a suburb, our neighbors had themselves an Association and we planted evergreens along the road.

Jump ahead a few years and our hedge had grown into a 20 foot green wall, giving us total privacy to replace our view, not a bad trade-off.  Our neighbors on our side of the Green Curtain had also put in hedges so that for a stretch of highway across from the Association nothing could be seen of us pioneers and our less than majestic hovels.  Out of sight, out of mind, so say the philosophers of social inequity.

Eventually I made peace with the suburbanites.  Nice folks mostly, especially the second generation of newcomers.  And so one spring day I pruned the lower limbs of all the evergreen laurels lining the road, opening up views of our shack and gardens and greenhouses.  For days, for weeks, I cut and hauled and burned, slowly revealing what had been hidden for a decade and a half or more, our Shangri-La-La chic chalet and its estate.

One by one every neighbor dropped by to tell me how nice our pruning was, what a great difference, how pleased they were.  Good fences, I concluded, don’t make good neighbors, they screen them out.  The next year I cut those laurels down to the ground, the filberts too.  Even put up artwork along the road as a gesture of more goodwill this past year.  We get along okay, but lately, I don’t know, maybe just the ornery curmudgeon in me, maybe all the fighting going on over there this past year, I sometimes miss that big green wall.

Maybe you’re like me, a little oblivious to the latest trends in fashion.  My last haircut, for instance, was 2019 B.C., Before Covid, but lately I’ve gotten wind of social media sites that allow you — and I use that word hesitantly — allow you to adjust and enhance your profile image.  You want fuller lips, less chin, more nose, wider eyes, they got a program that can do that … and much much more.  You think folks wouldn’t want a virtual facelift, botox without the neurotoxins, breast enhancements or a digital youth serum, hoo boy, stand over here by me, the Nerd Geezer Club.

In the universe of selfies and eternal Facebook updates, what else would you expect?  The computer mirror reflects back our enhanced image, not quite real but then, why do we use make-up, eyeliner, lipstick, mascara and hair coloring?  We’re obsessed with our self-image and now … we can alter that image through the magic of digital plastic surgery.  And if you like that ‘look’, that new and improved you, well, there are real plastic surgeons waiting  to assist you with implants, injections, fat burning, lipo-suction and scalpels.  Beauty may be in the eye of the beholder, but it can be yours for free on the internet or at a price in the doctor’s office.

Sure, I can be disdainful, after all, no touch up or even major surgery is going to help me at this late stage.  Too late for this old fart.  Although … I could use a haircut, maybe a little off the side and a foot off the back, color up those gray hairs, move my ears back a bit, make my eyes look wise — and while we’re at it, how about a hat that wasn’t half beat up?  Okay, how about just the hat.

Some computer programmer recently entered his digital painting in an art competition — and took first prize.  Much to the disdain and outrage of the artists who lost to that computer generated artwork.  Now, to be fair, photoshop has been competing with photography for years and any photo can be turned into a watercolor or a pencil sketch or a poster at the click of a command, then printed on canvas or watercolor paper or poster board.

This particular prize-winning painting was hyper-realistic … but had elements of classic styles that gave it a retro modern artworkiness.  Obviously the judges were impressed, if not the competition.  Get ready for the Future, y’all, it’s already here, suitable for framing.  You don’t think Artificial Intelligence will analyze the entire encyclopedia of poetry, then create a moody amalgam that will stand up to its human created peers, you been spending too much time on Instagram.  These plucky binary bibliophiles will be writing sonnets, rap songs, plays and novels before you can say Billy Shakespeare.  Paintings, music, literature, they’re boning up on styles and techniques, analyzing what we humans prefer, copying this and improving that, next thing you know they got a bestseller, a hit song, a Pulitzer Prize, the next Big Thing.

I’ve been warning my artist cronies since I got my hands on photoshop, you need to up your game, move into the future before they have a chance to copy you.  Course, they may beat us there anyway, but I say give them a run for their circuits.  Sure, it’s a losing fight, but hey, if that wasn’t your goal at the outset, maybe you picked up the wrong profession.  Probably should’ve gone into Coding, program your own computer to do your art.  Just saying …..

I got a buddy who claims he was the first Owner-Builder on Camano Island.  The year was 1977, the same year I bought my shack.  I met him 13 years later and we ended up building 3 sailboats together, one for each of us and one for his pal the building inspector who became my friend too.  Ironically, I may be one of the last Owner-Builders in Island County.  I don’t think my permit was ever signed off on so I may well be the last official O-B.

I guess maybe they figured the codes got too complex for us amateur housebuilders, all those R-factors for insulation and E-glass in fenestrations and X-factors for our marriages.  Or maybe it was this:  a permit for an Owner-Builder was next to nothing, something like $50 when I got ours.  The county might’ve done the taX-factor and realized us hippies were costing them revenue.  Maybe some of us built our own palaces to save the permit expense, but I would’ve paid full freight just for the right to build my own place the way I wanted.  A few hundred bucks wasn’t gonna stop me.

I spoze we can still build our own Xanadu, nothing to stop us.  Just have to disclose that a rank amateur threw the hammer and ran the saw, flashed the windows, shingled the roof, installed the electric and plumbing and if you’re the prospective buyer, best beware!!!  The people at the county sheds told me I’d be a Total Idiot to apply for an Owner-Builder status.  Boy, he read me like a book.  A comic book, I’d bet.

By the time I got our permit, us Owner-Builders had to meet the same codes as any fly-by-night contractor, go through the same inspections, all the rigamarole as the Big Boyz.  In other words, the government here doesn’t allow for hippie shacks or slam-bang cabins.  We got to build our parents’ suburban homes.  Might explain why kids just stay with their folks now — why bother building the same damn place twice?

I love Republicans.  Seriously, who else would run candidates based solely on their complete allegiance to Trump, a con-man, a crook, a liar, a sexual predator and, famously in the words of his then Secretary of State, a f…@$%…g! moron?  Take Dr. Oz.  Please.  What better GOP MAGA candidate but a quack snake oil salesman, literally.  But better yet, take a gander at Herschel Walker running for the Senate in Georgia.  Football star, MAGA man, a poster child for Complete Idiot.  On climate change he speculated how the Chinese had moved their dirty air over here and now we would have to move it somewhere else … or something like that, who knows?  He certainly didn’t.  Addressing the Inflation Reduction Act’s provision to combat climate change by planting more trees, he asked why we would need more, got plenty already.  Why stock fish, I want to ask.  Why worry about reservoirs evaporating or aquifers going dry, got plenty of water already.  Floods in plenty of places, move it to the lowering aquifers.  Along with that dirty Chinese air.  The point is, do we need an IQ test for these candidates?  Some minimal acquaintance with reality, at least.  Sure, Trump lowered the bar pretty close to the ground, but do we have to dig trenches now?

A dumb football star for Senator, why not?  We had a reality TV star as President, a know nothing who wouldn’t bother to read briefing reports, ignorance being bliss, I guess.  Just watch his fawning Fox phony news guys and see what works for them, that’s plenty for his highness.  We’re talking grown men here, a lifetime that might have been spent looking for answers to the questions that might arise if they held the public office they seek.  But no, too much trouble, too many facts … and we know what they think of those.

We’ve grown pretty accustomed to neo-fascist candidates offered up as worthy office seekers, Qanon acolytes, conspiracy theorists, anti-vaxxers and science deniers, and yeah, it might be worth testing for neural activity, but lately the pool of political aspirants seems to be a drying puddle of flopping tadpoles hoping to evolve legs and lungs after a primary race to determine who is the whackiest of the whacky.  Alert the executives of Netflix, this is reality TV at its most entertaining. Except, of course, the joke is on us.  Plenty of trees?  Sure, but hey fellas, where’s the forest?